Guess who is writing songs with her ukulele?
I’d like to give a huge grateful shout out to Tejon Street Music in downtown Colorado Springs. Long story short, today the owners of this music shop, John & Pam Ramsey, totally saved the day. I was shipped the wrong size ukulele case from an eBay seller and have no time to deal with an exchange as I leave in less than 3 days for Mexico. The Ramseys had nothing to do with this gaffe, nothing at all. But when I showed up at their store this morning with the soprano case they quickly and quite sweetly traded me for a concert case, giving me the full trade-in value of what I paid for the case online. They had an awesome selection of cases — I opted for the brown alligator hard side with strap and humidity gauge. It is so very pretty and Uli, the Ukulele (that’s right she has a name!) can now travel safe and secure.
I am a big fan of online shopping. I love love love it. It just made perfect sense for me to order a case and have it shipped to me. But after being in the lovely Tejon Street Music and meeting John & Pam, I was reminded that I love love love good hearted people who are passionate for their work even more. If you’re in Colorado Springs, make sure to check their store out — they not only sell ukes, they make them! They also stock guitars, mandolins, cellos, violins… in other words, they are totally strung out. I hope I remember the warm fuzzy feeling I got walking out of the store, new case in hand and smile on my face, the next time I get the urge to point and click through my shopping list.
When I decided to call my album Making It Up As I Go Along, it was an homage to the improvisational and nomadic life I have lived for the past decade. I’ve traveled to 6 continents, lived full time in 2 foreign countries and navigated the international health care system. Yep, I’ve been “going with the flow” for a while now. But REALLY and SERIOUSLY and TRULY, naming my album Making It Up As I Go Along was not an invitation to the universe to throw every spontaneous hiccup my way! Planning the CD release and my tour has been an arduous task and it still isn’t set in stone… performance dates have been confused, cd production has been postponed due to Acts of God, cases of celebratory wine have been shipped to the wrong address and airline tickets have been swapped time and again. NUTS, I tell you. But it has been a good, protein-filled, tastes-great-with-dark-chocolate nuts!
So please stay tuned and bear with as tour dates are announced – Puerto Vallarta, I am coming to you on 23 March and will return again in April. Zihuatanejo, Fort Myers, Austin, San Francisco, Berkeley, Saratoga Springs and Santa Cruz: I am on my way, I swear. But I am… wait for it…. Making It Up As I Go Along. Sorry, I had to.
I was thumbing through songwriting magazines at Borders today and a fellow bookshop browser asked me if I was a songwriter. I happily answered “yes” and we started talking back and forth about genre, process, experience, plans. I told him about my album, he told me about his dreams to write and record a rock album… someday. I felt an unmistakable rush of happiness that I haven’t waited for “someday.” Go me.
What are you waiting to do someday? Go you… today.
Me: Guess what’s arriving in the mail today?
7 year old boy: Umm… I don’t know, what?
Me: A ukulele! Do you know what a ukulele is?
7 year old boy: Yes.
Me: Well, what is it?
7 year old boy: If you don’t know what it is, why did you order it?
I believe this might be the definition of touché.
PS One week later and I am madly in love with the ukulele. I’m watching about 2 hours of youtube tutorials a day, strumming til I can’t strum no more and making the geekiest of geek chord flashcards. Rock UKE on!
I actually stumbled across the new music service, Bandcamp, while looking for a good way to stream music on my website. Several of my favorite indie musicians use Bandcamp’s “share” feature to host their music and it was, by far, the cleanest, easiest to load and most accessible streaming of any of the 200+ band websites I looked at in the past few months.
I soon learned that Bandcamp is so much more than a way to embed music on my own website. The platform is really proof positive of the adage, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” The founder, Ethan Diamond, came up with the idea because one of his favorite independent bands was struggling to get their music out to their fans. Many indie musician websites are not able to handle the traffic loads of streaming music in addition to processing downloads. On top of this, let’s face it, a lot of band websites are ugly, flash-heavy and search engine nightmares. So Bandcamp set out to create an easy platform for music to go from musician to music lover, from band to fan, from me to you.
So how does Bandcamp work?
On my side, I am able to customize the page to fit with the aesthetic of my website with a few color options and my own banner. I upload my own tracks, fill in the lyrics & liner notes as wanted and make all my own download & payment decisions. I can have tracks available for free, a set price or let fans decide how much to pay. I can also include bonus materials in downloads and offer physical CDs for sale with shipping & tax figured out for me right within Bandcamp. The whole process is easy-peasy.
On your side, you’ll first notice Bandcamp at work here on this website and also on Facebook. Anytime I embed a song, it’s done using Bandcamp. If you want to hear more, all you have to do is go to my custom Bandcamp site — isahrai.bandcamp.com. From there you can listen to my music streamed as mp3s or you can purchase the entire album or individual tracks. Remember all that hubbub about iTunes and DRM files? You could buy a song on iTunes for 99 cents but wouldn’t be able to share it with anyone. Or you could buy a DRM-free song for 30 cents more. All songs on Bandcamp are DRM-free and you can download them as basic mp3s or as higher quality FLAC, Apple Lossless, AAC or just about any other sound format you can think of. Total sweet sounding music score! And yes, I do want you to share my music. Go ahead, put it on a mix tape! Better yet, you can share my music direct from Bandcamp. Just click on the “share” button on the album or any individual track’s page and it will give you options to embed one of those clean & crisp Bandcamp music players on Facebook, Twitter, email, etc. Go forth, my merry fans and bring me more fans! It really is simple as a pimple.
Sorry, here comes the uncomfortable money talk… oh wait, it isn’t uncomfortable at all! I GET IT ALL. That’s right, Bandcamp takes no commission on my CD sales. And that is awesome as a possum.
A lot of people have been asking me for a heads up when my music hits iTunes or Amazon. While my music will be available in these megastores at some point (there are queues and forms and more queues to be navigated first), my music is available! now! yes! right now! at Bandcamp! It is easy to buy through Bandcamp — just click “Buy Now” to order a physical CD to be shipped to you (which will also give you a free immediate download of the entire album to tide you over until the disc arrives) or “Download Album” to purchase a digital copy. You can also purchase individual tracks by clicking on the song title. The payment options are the same as iTunes: credit card or Paypal. There go you, cool as school. But it isn’t school… it’s Bandcamp!
For more information about Bandcamp, make sure to check out their very informative FAQ section HERE or read this interview with Bandcamp founder, Ethan Diamond, HERE on waxy.org.
And because I know you’re all wondering why I would allow my album to stream in its entirety online, read a very interesting article on piracy HERE.
As I mentioned in my last post, the development of this website was an arduous task as I struggled to balance design with function, personal with professional, pretty with polished…and somehow make sure I fit Betty the Bee into the whole scheme of things. I actually did 2 other complete designs before settling on the current organization and look. And what inspired this last look? My friend, Cara’s blender.
I was laboring on the website one weekend at her house and paused to make myself a smoothie. I dug out her blender and immediately noticed one thing… or rather, the lack of many other things. Her old fashioned blender was made of one solid glass carafe with the blade attached, the lid and the base. Even more minimalistic were the power setting options: high, low, off. Either you blend fast, you blend slow or you don’t blend at all. As a smoothie, homemade salad dressing, pesto, blended soup fiend, I have used many a blender in my day and they usually have at least 10 speed options. Really, what is the difference between blend and mix? Or puree and cream? As I threw in the yogurt, frozen peaches and fresh blackberries, my mind stayed focused on the website mess I had created for myself. But as I flipped the switch: high for about 60 seconds, then down to low to get the last bits folded in, it flipped as switch in me and I thought of the design mantra: KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Well, duh.
Smoothie in hand (and let’s be honest, a triple espresso in the other), I headed back to the computer and started from scratch. I made a list of everything I needed on the website as a whole, everything I needed on the home page and what were the most important aesthetic considerations to keep in mind (and what could be thrown away). The new design mockup came together in Photoshop in about 20 minutes. 24 hours later and the first draft of the site was done. The layout holds everything element on my checklist without being confusing or overwhelming. When I decided to Keep It Simple (Stupid), all of the silly bells and whistles that were bogging me down were discarded and I was left with a clean, playful and informative website.
Luckily for me, the KISS method also works in my music. Folk music has long been known for its bare bone approach to melody and lyrics. It is simple, yes, but more importantly, it is purposeful. Some folk songs might have 19 different tracks working together, some might have 2 – a voice and a guitar. The folk songwriter works with not only melody and words but with each instrument to tell the story of the song. When we were recording Making It Up As I Go Along, finding the right balance on each song was a delicious challenge. There was no question in my mind that “Human Rights” would have voices and guitar and nothing else. Because Human Rights should be that plain, that clear to see (and hear). On the other hand, 1 Corinthians 6:19 has almost 20 layers of voices, guitars, strings and percussion. It is a complicated song with a very complicated history that needed to convey the broken, the passion and the triumph of my experience with cancer and my journey to self love. But even with this complex song, KISS was in full effect as I deleted contradictory bass lines, vocal parts and turned back the volume on the strings. I was very lucky to have a rock & roll guy on hand to help me manage all those parts and to convince me that sometimes, even (especially) folk music, needs a driving beat or an electric guitar to get is point across. As we debated parts and crafted each song, I felt a clear affirmation of my space in the folk genre as each track so seamlessly contributed to the story and kept in line with the intent of the song. There were challenges along the way, of course, but overall it was, indeed, quite simple.
To view a list of the plugins I used on the website to keep things running simply and smoothly, please visit my links page.
isahrai.com has been around for over a decade now. It started as a way for me to just play around with html code as I passed the time during a bad bout of insomnia. As I tinkered, I made some really ugly websites but I also tapped into a deep passion for the power that the internet holds for us as individuals and as a global community. Over the years, the website has transitioned from a testing ground to a poetry repository to a design portfolio (now located at irmacreative.com) to a personal blog & travelogue documenting my life in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Over these past 10 years I’ve learned a lot about the inner workings of websites and even more about how I want to interact in the world, both in cyberspace and IRL. Thinking back on the many incarnations of isahrai.com is very much a walk in memory lane. The focus of the website at any given time is a very accurate reflection of what my life was focused on at the time and so now, voila, it’s MUSIC!
I’ve never labored so meticulously and with such trepidation on a website as this one. Music is my business so, of course, I wanted a very professional and thorough representation but, dude, it’s my music which is so very personal and so very intimately mine so there needs to be a reflection of that. Finding this balance has been a hard go that took many cups of coffee and a even a few tears. I finally had to have a friend “threaten” me with a deadline; either I finished the site or she would confiscate the case of red wine we had bought to celebrate the release of my album. I hunkered down, made decisions, got my creative groove on and wrapped it up, saving my red wine and my sanity.
This website is my primary portal for sharing my music, my calendar and everything else music related. This notebook, however, will probably take little detours into other passions such as yoga, travel, cooking, wine, social commentary and technology. These passions, obviously, leave their imprints on the melodies and lyrics of my music so why not carve out a little corner on the site as well?
So. Welcome! Feel free to poke around and come back for more. I’ll be here.
Post Script: Commenting capabilities may be added at a later date but for a smooth launch, I’ve disabled this feature. If you’ve got something you’re just dying to tell me, please use my contact form or head to my facebook page and post there.
